My New Tank Spec vs. Choppa

During Gromils Crossing last night I got stuck far off by the keg capture point and was followed by a Choppa. I was instantly incited to test my new Tank build out on this lowly choppa. I, being mounted, began to head past him when he began flailing his choppas causing my Gyro-copter to malfunction. I quickly dismounted and charged into mortal combat with the ugly greenie. Within the first few seconds I had a great upper hand. My attacks were hitting him pretty hard and I got him to 50% with out hesitation. But once he got to 50% I had a rough time grinding his health down further. That damn tactic of his was healing him faster than I could DPS him! My grudges were full by this time and it was time to start spamming my new favorite ability, Oathstone. And it worked quite well. Keeping my positioning up I kept at him, but he was working me down really fast now. His knock downs left me taking 1k+ of damage since I couldn't defend w/ my shield (i only have 8k HP). The last few seconds were neck and neck. We were both at 5% health. My Earthshatter was on cool down and that is my primary source of crit damage. I was critting him with that earlier at about 1k. Quickly I popped my Oathstone and he ended up eating my shield as I hit him for 600HP.

It was far from an easy victory. I barely limped away from the fight with about 300HP. There are still many abilities that I failed to use that could have left me at a higher advantage.

What I need to incorporate into my RvR battles:

- Shield Of Reprisal. Knocking down my opponent for a few seconds would have really helped out. But I'm still not used to using a situational knockdown (one that can only be used when I block). Cave-in has really spoiled me.

-Taunt. I seem to have misplaced it and it wasn't in my action bar during the fight. That extra damage could have helped out, but I'm not really sure how much the taunt helps in RvR when someone like a Choppa is wailing on you. Edit: Taunt used to be a lot more useful. It seems that it only does an additional 3% damage now...

-Punishing Blow. yep, I completely forgot about this ability. If I had used it I could have caused two possible outcomes:
1) He would stop circling around me and fight me face to face making my blocks much more effective and making Oathsone a sure bet.
2) He would keep running circles and take some damage. This would have helped counter balance all the healing his tactic was doing.

-Away with ye. Didn't use it once. And if I had used it with the Punishing Blow, It would have been a great way to give myself a breather and force him to walk to me.

Yep, there is plenty of room for improvement when it comes to my RvR Tanking. I do think that I had my tactics set up pretty well though. Offering a good amount of damage output, but not limiting the use of my shield

Sweet Revenge + Raising Anger + Shield Mastery + Seasoned Veteran

Oh yeah, my current build.

Any other thoughts on how I could successfully run with my Tank in RvR would be very much appreciated.

Thanks!

Demons, Khorn, & Angry Hell Dogs

Last night I broke down and respected Stone Mastery. I've gone from R1 - R40 with my two-hander, and for sure he will be missed, but the fact is that I just don't do enough damage with my two-hander to make it worth while. I will really miss my Powered Etchingse tactic (aoe knock back) and Cave In (4 sec knockdown). Two awesome crowd control abilities that really made it hard for me to go over to the axe and shield.

Ok, I'm ready to tank!
A group of alliance members and I made an awesome run through Bastain Stairs last night. We flew through the left & right wing with out any problems. In the right wing I managed to pick up Bloodlord Irongaunts the first PQ there. The middle part was full of blood trusty followers of Khorn, but posed little a challenge until we reached the final PQ. On the way I did manage to get Axe of the Bloodmoon. Considering I had a crap-tastic R29 axe, I'm happy! And I think it pares very nicely with the Bloodlord Irongaunts (+7 chit chance together).

I'm a little surprised that we even made it through that last PQ. Khorn Bloodletters were a bitch and a half to take down. Yet, when we got to the Big bloodletter at the end, he was a cinch. But it was this guy who made my night![We did all this while the rest of our guildies raided IC... PS, I'm bored of raiding IC.]
It took us 2 tries to down him (as this is the first time I've even seen the middle wing) and I was pretty surprised that I didn't get splattered or loose agro.

As you can see we had a BWx2, RP, WP, AM, and Me (IB).

I'd like to blame Brasus for forcing me to have fun in Bastian Stairs. It was a rockin' group and a damn good time (Even if it did take forever!).

Guilty & some other stuff

Ok so I've not posted in a while for a few reasons. Primarily because I got bored with my IB one day and rolled a Squig Herder on Phoenix Throne (an RP server) and, low and behold, I loved the orc talking RP play style. Perhaps it's just a phase, I'm still not sure, but I've spent the past 2 weeks playin my squishy squiggy.

You can call me a traitor and all that stuff now. Especially cause I would sit at home, paint some of my dwarven models, and then log on my squig herder. GUILTY as charged. I know. But the RP is so much more fun than logging on and hearing "When is the token system coming out!?!?!" & "The raiders lost another football game! NOOOO!" So yeah, I don't have to hear all that jazz. *cheer*

wait... did I just say token system?

I finally took the time to go through some of the new things coming out. I was wondering what ever happened to that RvR dungeon-esque Tome King expansion that I was so excited about months ago. Then I came across this, Dev Diary

Here are just a few quotes that made me happy:

"Thoughts of true action-RPG experiences crept in my mind. Visions of the Temple of Doom, Zelda, and God of War flashed through. Questionable levers, treasure that looks too good to be true, collapsing floors, swinging pendulums, spitting darts, (much) larger than life boss fights – I wanted it all."

"That’s when the blatantly obvious hit. We’re going to let players chase each other into dungeon instances."

"Every monster throughout the Necropolis desert has a chance to drop tokens, with which there is a lot of new phat gear and crafting materials to purchase."

Wow, lots of neat stuff. Traps and puzzles sound promising, but I'm not sure how it will go over with the MMO crowd despite my own excitement. In actuality, my old D&D games were full of traps and puzzles, that just made it all the more fun. The thing is that in an MMO your going to be doing that trap/puzzle over, and over, and over. With that being said, I better get my IB all geared up so that I can hit the Land of the Dead as soon as it breaks from it's shell. That way I'll get to partake in problem solving traps and not just tag along w/ everyone else.

Invading IC

It's finally Orders turn to return the glorious City Siege. Though the first time we made it there few order were on and even fewer destro around to defend – to top it off the server went down a few hours after the initial assault. Second time we hit it, just a few nights ago, I actually got to join in the fray (for it wasn’t at 3am like the first one).

Today we hit IC again, once again, like the first one, I totally missed it. *sigh* so I’m going to talk about the 2nd one! Yay.

First let me start by saying that all in all I enjoyed the city siege. It was ok farming with no destro, but got to be a lot of fun once destro showed up to wipe our asses for us and feed some renown. Mm mmm
There are a few things I want to point out about the attack though. A little, compare and contrast. Comparing the time that destroy siege Altdorf for those 4,5,6… however many days.

Two hours of PQ’s. It seems that we had about 3 hours for our City PQ (I was absent for about an hour and I think it started right when I left). I recall the Altdorf PQ’s being around 6 hours of madness. So for one of our sieges, destroy had 2. multiply the 6 or so times that they hit the city and it would take us 12 sieges to get the same amount of time, with seemingly less rewards.

No more Dungeon. Perhaps it’s just that I (or we) couldn’t find it, but I’m pretty sure that Mythic took that section out and added it to Stage II. I still have my fingers crossed that we’ll find a secret entrance.

Two Gold Bags per PQ. I was thinking that we would get a few more than 2 per PQ. Think about it, it takes at least four hours to get to the city gates (mind you, we do get rewarded along the way, but its no stroll in the park). Then we have three hours to pray that destroy doesn’t defend, and if they do, we hope they suck. But only 2 gold bags? At the same time I’m thinking that this is an attempt to keep groups from capping IC at 3am (cough cough, the first time we took it! Haha) and farming the living daylights out of it.

Boss Scales Down when the destro are around. And he scales up when destroy aren’t around. I thought this was awesome addition on Mythic’s part. Even though the boss still kicked my ass when we had 48 destro rollin’ around!

Easier to Advance to Stage II. We almost made it to stage II (or so we’d like to think, haha). We held at 91 VP’s for a while before it sunk down into the pits of hell, AKA IC. It seemed like we didn’t struggle as hard as destro had to in order to get that high. Perhaps it was just population imbalance.

Zerg vs BW OP so we are almost even. When destro was rollin’ us in up to altdorf they out numbered us in the ORvR lakes big time. And now destro claims that the BW’s over powered-ness is the cause of our success, SO BE IT! I’ll bask in the glory of our IC city sieges just as they did during our siege! We still need to cap the city 9 times to make it all even though… we’ll see how that pans out.

Honestly though, I had fun fighting against destro during the IC siege. It was great fun. Even if I didn’t get a stupid gold bag with an item that I can’t even wear for 20+ Renown Ranks.

And cheers to all the destro that showed up in our PQ to own us! Grinding PQ’s isn’t my bag, so thanks.

An Epic Battle at CoF!

Last night was an insane night for ORvR! When I had logged on, Order had already locked up all of Empire and the Elf zone was resetting (I was told that the server crashed right before I logged on). We had our alliance stationed at Dragon Wake, while other guilds set up in Thunder Mountain. No doubt, there was A LOT of order. I'd never seen so much order. I thought to myself as we rolled through a defended BO, "This is what desto feels like when they roll through us. WOW!" Needless to say this was the first time I'd gathered that feeling, and I could see how I'd get tired of it, but in that moment, it was amazing!

Order owned everything on the map except for Covenant of Flame (CoF) Keep, which was being defend by many a destro. We hit the keep and after a bit of door knocking we made it through the first... and soon after we demolished the second door. And destro were there ready with their pits of shades on their tank wall (It looked pretty awesome despite its destructive nature).

The order was given over vent, "Charge" so me, being the good little dwarf follower that I am, charged. It looked like others were heading up the ramp, so hey, why not. I made it up no problem but found myself standing alone in the midst of a tank wall and god knows how many pits of shades. It didn't take me long to die.


Order pushes on, we hold tight on the bottom floor while the doors respawn, and are broken back down again - this time with little resistance as most of the destro are in the keep guarding the ramp. Once the doors are down, we make a major push, a push where everyone actually cooperates, and we finally break through.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say the entire battle took about one hour. It was pretty awesome, even though we did outnumber destro, they put up a great fight. One hour of defence is nothing to scoff at. I'd say they had 100 or so on defence while we had just under 200. but that's a complete guess. Ether way, we out numbered them. Never the less it was an epic battle!

Twitter

Today I tried to get a Twitter account set up. Although it seems that this new site is so popular that I can't load a page with out ending up here:

"Twitter is over capacity.

Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again."

Tired of trying, maybe I'll 'tweet' another day. I'll be sure to post it here if it works out.

The Slayer

I've spent the past few weeks playing nothing but the slayer. I love this class! Perhaps this is why I've not posted on my blog much lately, been addicted to my slayer. I'm fairly sure that this character, Bitterstone, will become my main. Though I'm only lvl 23, im well on my way to T4. I slowed down my lvling rate a lot (went from 1-18 in less than a week) so that I could enjoy my character a bit more. But mainly to grid T2/T3 Inf for these kick ass Elven Hammer and Empire Hammer reward!